What is it about these Cambridge guys? You'd think the university that matriculated John Milton would not produce such funny alumni as Peter Cook, John Cleese, Sascha Baron Cohen and now Richard Ayoade, who has already established himself in the UK as a standup comic and a star of such shows as "The IT Crowd."

His debut film "Submarine," based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne (opens today) is a mordantly comic coming of age story about a pale, introverted, and fatally bright schoolboy named Oliver who with premature world-weariness confronts the inevitable initiation into the eternal verities of sex, death, disillusionment, and peer bullying.